Housekeeping: Adriane Little

May 23—Aug 1 2014

Gallery 1401

“Housekeeping” consists of a series of shadow boxes, image and text. For this project, Adriane Little meticulously cut 17 copies of the novel Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson) into individual words. Little took apart the books, cut the pages into strips and then cut them into individual words. The text from the book was then placed in the empty space of the shadow box and in front of the image. The act and ritual of cutting the books speaks to the persistence of loss and trauma, which here is fractured yet contained within the confines of the final framed work. With lineage tracing to Dada and surrealism and advanced by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, the cutting of the text also visualizes the cut-up literary technique. It is used here for its inherent nature of rewriting or reorganizing and in turn allowing for internal housekeeping in response to maternal loss. The images for this project dissolve the boundary between loss, inside and outside. For instance, images from the landscape that mimic wallpaper or wall paint. Because of the properties of the cut paper, the frame and the glaze, Little often travels to install the work herself, adding as a last step the cutup type, as it shifts into a unique pattern and position, specific to the site itself, sensitive to environmental conditions such as humidity and temperature.

Adriane Little earned a BS in Education from Buffalo State College and an MFA from the University at Buffalo. Her work has been displayed in numerous solo exhibitions, including the Lost Coast Culture Machine (Ft. Bragg, Calif.); the Institute of Culture (Trbovlje, Slovenia); Hammes Gallery at Saint Mary's College, Peak Gallery (Toronto); Big Orbit Gallery (Buffalo); the Carnegie Art Center in N. Tonawanda, N.Y.; and 621 Gallery in Tallahassee, Fla. Recent group exhibitions and film festivals include the “Thin Tissue of Likeness” at SCA Contemporary Art in Albuquerque; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s “Beyond/In Western New York 2005”; “Death Bizarre” at the Center for Photography at Woodstock; “Insatiable Streams: 10 Years of the Institute for Electronic Arts” at the Beijing B.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Beijing, China; “Video Art in the Age of the Internet” at the Chelsea Art Museum in NYC, “Particulate” at LumpWest Gallery in Eugene, Ore., which traveled to Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia;. “Vertical Hold” at Gallery One in Ellensburg, Wash., which traveled to Punch Gallery in Seattle; and the 9th Dawson City International Film Festival in the Yukon, Macon Film and Video Festival, Three Rivers Film Festival, Rockport Film and Video Festival, and the 21st Leeds International Film Festival, among others. Her video “Friction” has been included in the videoDictionary collection at the Video Art Foundation and the Fundacio La Caixa Videolibrary, both in Barcelona. She is a member of the Evolutionary Girls and [PAM] Perceptual Art Machine Project. Little is assistant professor of Photography and Intermedia in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University. She currently resides in Kalamazoo, Mich.